Brief Lives

by John Aubrey

Read by Brian Cox

William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hobbes – three of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. They, and many others, are here remembered by another great Englishman, John Aubrey, whose Brief Lives are some of the wittiest and most moving miniature portraits ever written.

Aubrey – a scholar, antiquarian and close observer of both the foibles and the courage of his contemporaries – lived through the upheavals of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. His little biographies are amusing, ribald, moving; a testament to the brevity of human existence and one of the most precious relics of a distant age.

2 CDs • Running Time: c.2½ hours • ISBN: 9-62634-378-8 • Catalogue no: NA237812 • RRP: £ 10.99

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Review by Sue Arnold, The Guardian

And finally, as Trevor McDonald said after every newscast, a book that won’t make you laugh or cry, just be grateful that the English language has writers like John Aubrey. These pen portraits of contemporary and near-contemporary luminaries such as Shakespeare, More, Raleigh, Hobbes, Erasmus and Descartes (who kept a one-legged compass in his drawer for doing his geometry) are as graphic as anything you’ll see on television. With Brian Cox’s rich voice reading them and seventeenth-century incidental music for viols, this is a must for connoisseurs.

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